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Admittedly, we're getting ahead of ourselves here. After all, we're only just getting 
started and the point of this chapter is to help you set up a basic Ubuntu Server 
installation to serve as the foundation for the rest of the chapter. When going 
through the installation process, we'll accept the defaults anyway. However, the 
goal of this section is to give you examples of the options you have for consideration 
later. At some point, you may want to get creative and play around with the 
partition layout.
With custom partitioning, you're able to do some very clever things. For example, 
with the right configuration, you'll be able to wipe and reload your distribution 
while preserving user data, logs, and more. This works because Ubuntu Server 
allows you to carve up your storage any way you want during installation. If you 
already have a partition with data on it, you can choose to leave it as is so you 
can carry it forward into a new install. You simply set the directory path where 
it's mounted to be the same as before, restore your configuration files, and your 
applications will continue working as if nothing happened.
One very common example of custom partitioning in the real world is separating the 
/home
 directory into its own partition. Since this is where users typically store their 
files, you can set up your server such that a reload of the distribution won't disturb 
their files. When they log in
 after a server refresh, all their
 files will be right where 
they left them. You could even place the files shared by your Apache web server 
on to their own partition and preserve those too. You can get very creative here.
Another reason to utilize separate partitions may be to simply create boundaries or 
restrictions. If you have an application running on your server that is prone to filling 
up large amounts of storage, you can point that application to its own partition, 
limited by size. An example of where this could be useful is an application's log files. 
Log files are the bane of any system administrator's life when it comes to storage. 
While helpful if you're trying to figure out why something crashed, logs can fill up 
a hard disk very quickly if you're not careful. In my experience, servers have been 
known to come to a screeching halt due to log files filling up all the available free 
space on a server where everything was on a single partition. The only boundary 
the application had was the entirety of the disk itself.
It probably goes without saying, but when reinstalling Ubuntu, 
you should back up partitions that have data you don't want to be 
wiped (even if you don't plan on formatting the partitions). The 
reason being, one wrong move (literally a single checkbox) and 
you can easily wipe out all the data on that partition. Always back 
up your data when refreshing a server.

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Chapter 1